So is this the season of the rains or what? It's getting ridiculous. Last night we had a couple nice evening beach hours and just when we were feeling like the bad weather was a thing of the past, the skies opened up and it was the tropics all over again, a huge deluge. But one has to pass the time at the shore somehow. For locals like myself, it means we head for Philly. And I give a big thumbs up to the Philly Zoo for an excellent day yesterday with myself and three tweeners. Watching the hippos bob for apples was a jaw dropper, literally. In any case, for people here on vacation, they are stuck sticking it out on the beach even though it's cloudy and depressing. I salute you, intrepid vacationers. The water's still pretty warm though, at least there's that.

But that is not the reason I brought you here, to complain about the weather. It's to relate this story: The other night, I was walking home from Mento's, the Ventnor water ice and ice cream stand, with my two daughters, who are 12 and 14. A car passed by and a guy leaned out his head and shouted: "Shoobies, go home!" At us! We were stunned because, hey, we're usually the ones doing the shoobie eye-rolling, though we've never actually suggested shoobies go home, because we like the shoobies. Some of them are our good friends. Anyway, we were thinking, what about us made them think we were shoobies? Here we are, just a block from our home, hey buddy, we LIVE here. Some of us were BORN down the shore. We are graduates of Shore public schools. Our friends surf, even if we do not. We will grow up to be beach badge checkers. So what was it? We narrowed it down to two things.

One: the very act of going to get ice cream at night and then walking around with your ice cream cone is very shoobie. We admit that. Hey, gang, we're at the shore, let's get ice cream! Ok, guilty. But there was another important factor in our shoobie-ness that night. In reality, I had started the outing with just my 12 year old, and then we swung around to pick up my 14 year old at a friend's house. She wanted a ride home in a car, but consented to being picked up on foot because we were already nearby. After the shoobie slander, she realized her mistake: Only shoobie teenagers down the shore and, essentially, held hostage, isolated from their home peer group, would be out walking with their parents at 10:30 at night. The locals, naturally, roam in unsupervised packs until curfew. So there we were, making like shoobies. So much for my walk with the girls. They took off, put a block between them and their mom, and made like locals.